Hello,
Excuse my late response but I was on leave.
Well, we are also upgrading quite recently (once every 1-2 months) and as mickael already noted we are also expanding the usage of the JIDE libs(we have the ultimate suite) to even more products hence we will need a better/more efficient way for updating and testing our code when trying out new JIDE releases.
I am not sure how many of your customers use Maven and if it is actually worth the effort, that is something that you need to decide and maybe make a poll in order to gather some feedback from your customers.
Having said that, I also believe that having a maven repository will bring the following two benefits:
1) There are other tools/libraries that can also resolve maven dependencies (e.g. Apache Ivy, Buildr, Grails etc.). As an example take a look at the following
comons-io dep information from the Maven Central Search Engine on how dependency information is declared for use by other tools. Hence you could benefit even more of your customers, not just Maven users.
2) Secondly and most importantly, if I am not mistaken you are already uploading all of your new releases on a file server or something and managing user rights through some software or some servlet or something, etc. If instead, you had a Maven repository, you could still serve all of your files, securely using one software package that is created exactly for that purpose. You can also leave the Web download functionality but simply redirect it to the maven repository, through some custom servlet or something. You can also attach the source stubs to the artifacts by using classifiers and also serve almost any file by simply changing the classifier and type properties of the dependency, etc. So you could also still serve your mega-bundle through the repo as a zip file(e.g. so that it is available for download from the web) by simply selecting some appropriate groupId, artifactId, classifier, etc. You can also embed deployment to your repo in your Ant scripts by simply using Ants' exec command and fully automate your deployment cycle, etc.
So my opinion is that it would also greatly benefit you as a company.
Please also note that we do not only have to update and test against the JIDE libraries but we have dozens of other dependencies as well we need to take care of, as most of your users probably do.
We have switched to Maven about two years ago and we have never looked back. We of course continue to use Ant and other tools where needed. We actually use Ant scripts for mavenifying libraries or simply deploying them to the maven repo, etc.
Regards